A blog dedicted to the history of arcade video games from the bronze and golden ages (1971-1984).

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 7

In 1981, Centuri had undergone one
of the most remarkable transformations in coin-op history, going from perennial
also-ran to major player in a single year. As 1982 dawned, they seemed ready to
enter the upper echelons of the industry, but only time would tell if they
would be able to do so.

1982
Games (Part 1)

Round-Up

Licensed from Hiraoka[1] (probably the same company
that created Phoenix), Round-Up was released in December of
1981. The game was a combination maze/puzzle game with emphasis on “puzzle”. The
player controlled a character called “Cowboy” who, despite his name, was more
of a ghostly-white version of Pac-Man with eyes, legs, and a pink hat. The
action took place in a concentric maze at the center of which was a grid of 9
(later 16) white circles. The goal was replace all the white circles with red ones.
To do this, “cowboy” had to “round up” red “knights” then “push” a new red
circle into a row or column of the grid. Opposing Cowboy were five “gly boys”:
Ugly, Beastly, Ghastly, Homely, and Deadly. Aiding his efforts was King Rompus,
whom the player could touch to temporarily freeze all enemies and knights. The
game also featured a bonus round in which the player had complete one side of a
Rubik’s Cube (which they called an “electronics cube”) so that it matched a
target pattern. While the game was certainly innovative, it wasn’t much of a
hit and Centuri probably sold around 700-1,200 copies. The game was later
released by Taito as Fitter.

D-Day

One of Centuri’s
sorriest releases was April’s D-Day,
licensed from Italy’s Olympia, a company that had been founded by Livio Leante.
While Olympia was headquartered in Milan, their games were developed and
manufactured at their factory in Bari (supposedly home to the second university
in Italy to offer a degree in information science). Olympia produced its first
game, Master’s Game (a Breakout-like game) in 1979, possibly
under the Leante Games brand. From 1979 to 1983, the company produced at least
a dozen and a half titles, many of them knockoffs of existing hits. ­D-Day was their most successful game
and the only one to be released in the U.S. Looking at the game’s crude
graphics, it’s hard to see why. The game was a shooter in which the player used
a single cannon to defend a beachhead from enemies including tanks, ships,
planes, and trucks. It was a perhaps Centuri’s biggest flop of the decade and
probably less than 100 units were sold.

Loco-Motion/Guttang
Gottong

A bit more successful, but not much, was Loco-Motion (known as Guttang Gottong in Japan), licensed from Japan’s Konami (formerly known for their very profitable relationship with Stern). . The game was
based on the ubiquitous 15-piece sliding block puzzle invented by Noyce Chapman
in 1880
in which the player slid blocks horizontally or vertically within a frame to
complete a picture or rearrange the blocks in numerical sequence. In Loco-Motion, the video “frame”
contained 15 blocks, each with a section of a railroad track on it. As a train
chugged around the track, the player had to slide the blocks to create a path
for it and prevent it from crashing. The player also had to guide the train to
pick up trackside passengers. If a passenger wasn’t picked up within a
reasonable amount of time, they were replaced by a countdown timer and if the
player didn’t reach the timer before the time reached zero, A “Crazy Train” appeared
that the player had to avoid. While the game was not a hit, it was one of the
earliest examples of an arcade puzzle game.

Centuri sold only $576,000 worth of Loco-Motion games in 1982, probably translating to about 300-500
units. In the long run, however, the game may have Centuri’s most important
release of the year since Centuri’s relationship with Konami would prove
perhaps even more lucrative than Stern’s had been.

The Pit

1982
was an international year for Centuri. Loco-Motion
had been licensed from a Japanese company, D-Day from an Italian one, and April’s The Pit came from jolly old England. The game was developed by the British
company AW Electronics (aka Andy Walker Electronics, for its founder). In his
youth, Andy Walker had served as a shipboard radio operator before spending ten
years in the British Foreign Office. In 1977, while working at a government
electronics center, he had his first brush with computers when he encountered a
Honeywell 316 mini-computer. Instantly captivated, he purchased a kit computer
consisting of single board with an 8080 microprocessor, a small amount of RAM,
and a set of 8 red LEDs for output (as with the Altair and other early
computers, it didn’t support a monitor). The only documentation consisted of a
single photocopied page of instructions and a copy the 8080 instruction set.
Programs had to be entered a byte at a time via 8 toggle switches. If the user
made a mistake, they had to start over again from the beginning. In addition, the
computer had no way to permanently store data, so even if a user did enter the
data correctly, the program only lasted until they turned the computer off.
This led to an amusing (at least in hindsight) incident. Walker entered program
after program, only to find that they didn’t work. After spending days trying
to sort things out, he finally discovered that to enter a 1 the user had to
flip the toggle switch up and to enter a 0 he had to switch it down. This was
obvious to American users but not to Walker, since in the U.K. (and most other
countries), switches worked exactly the opposite way (to turn a light on, for
instance, you pushed the switch down rather than up). Nonetheless, Walker
eventually tamed the electronic beast and taught himself how to program in hex
code. In 1981, fascinated by the new microcomputers that were appearing on the
scene, Walker asked his bosses to send him to a small systems course to learn
more about the machines. Convinced that the future was in mainframes and
minicomputers rather than micros, they refused. Not long afterwards, Walker’s
job changed and rather than relocate he quit and formed a company called Andy
Walker Electronics (AWE - aka Slogan Court Ltd.) in the seaside town of
Birdlington.

Deciding to build a computer of his own, Walker acquired a Tangerine
Microtan 65 computer (a 6502-based kit computer). After putting it together, he
ordered another and began writing programs in assembly language, displaying
simple, interactive shapes on a black-and-white monitor. Realizing the system
had potential, he hired another programmer named Tony “Gibbo” Gibson from
Barnstable in Devon. Meanwhile, he purchased three graphics board (one each for
red, green, and blue) and set about designing new hardware that expanded the MicroTan’s
meager RAM, sound and graphics capabilities. After persuading a local company
to turn his design into actual circuit boards, Walker programmed a crude Defender clone called Andromeda on his new system. Realizing
that it was a bit too crude, he trashed the game and started again,
eventually bringing in Gibson. Working together in a spare room in their house,
Walker and Gibson would write code in assembly language then print it out and pin
it to the wall so they could remember the memory addresses the next day. When
they added joystick control to the game, they realized they could make a
coin-op game. Young and full of confidence, they decided they could create
their own from scratch and Walker began designing a cabinet. He ended up
creating a multi-game system that allowed operators to swap ROM boards on the
fly without turning the machine off (Walker described it as a “video jukebox”).
Around this time, a third member joined the team - a graphic designer named
Andy Rixon. Before long, the trio had created two additional games for the
system: Hunter and The Pit. Oddly enough, it was a bug in Andromeda that led directly to the creation
of The Pit.

[Andy
Walker] The spaceship had a fin on the back and it didn’t always rub itself
out. It would paint the screen in pixels but then when it went through a second
time it would tunnel through them. Ah, there’s a game there.

<”The
Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

With
three games completed, Walker and Gibson packed their system into a rented
Nissan van and headed to the Cunard Hotel in Hammersmith for the London
Previews (a prominent British trade show). They set up a small both next to a
major manufacturer (where the near constant music from a Frogger machine nearly drove them mad) and got their system
up-and-running, which required loading the operating system from cassette tape
- a process that took fifteen minutes or more. Then, five minutes before the
show started, an electrician told everyone they were going to turn off the
power for a few minutes. Panic set in as Walker and Gibson had to hurriedly
reboot their system and wait several painstaking minutes as the first visitors
wandered into their booth only to be greeted by a screen with a “loading…”
message.

In
the end, however, things worked out just fine. They made the acquaintance of
Norman Parker, who headed Zilec Electronics in Burton-on-Trent, one of the
U.K.’s leading arcade game manufacturers. Parker took a look at their system
and was duly impressed. After the show, Walker paid a visit to the Zilec
factory and Parker suggested he show his system to Centuri sales exec Joel
Hochberg, who was Zilec’s agent (it appears that he had also set up his own
company called Coin-It by this time). Hochberg was interested in their system
and had them ship it to him in Florida (Zilec actually handled the shipping). During
testing in Miami, The Pit proved to
be the most popular of the system’s three games and Hochberg quickly licensed
it to Centuri, netting AW Electronics a royalty of $136 per machine at a time
when the going rate was around $40. Hochberg took a large part of the royalty
for himself, but Walker didn’t mind since Hochberg had given him the foot in the
door he needed to establish himself in arcade industry. While Hochberg liked
the game, the multi-game system proved impractical

[Andy
Walker] Our (treasured) rack-mounted Tangerine custom hardware worked fine but
was really unsuitable for mass-production and Joel suggested that we completely
abandon it in favour of Centuri (capable, successful) boards - and he was
right. The software guys at Centuri knew their board inside-out and got The Pit rewritten in fantastic time. It
was quickly agreed that it should be released as a single game - and that was
shown to be right decision too.

Meanwhile,
Zilec/Zenitone produced a version of The
Pit for English arcades based on the Galaxian
board and assigned the task of porting the game to a pair of new Zilec engineers – brothers Chris and Tim
Stamper (who went on to form their own company called Ashby Computers &
Graphics, designed the game Blue Print for
Bally/Midway, and later founded the software company Rare).

The Pit was
a digging game – a kind of crude predecessor to Dig Dug, Mr. Do, and Boulder
Dash (whose creator, Peter Liepa, named The Pit as a major influence). The player guided a "space
prospector" through an underground landscape strewn with boulders in an
effort to collect a series of seven gems while avoiding enemy astronauts and
falling rocks. Three of the gems were located in a large rectangular
"pit" at the bottom of the screen whose ceiling was lined with
falling enemies. Other obstacles included a pool of green acid(?) with a
disappearing floor above it. While the player collected gems, the
"zonker" (a name had chosen for the American version) slowly chipped
its way through a mountain protecting the mother ship. If the player made their
way back to the mother ship before the zonker "zonked" it, they
received a bonus depending on how many gems they collected. As with most games,
there were a few features that didn’t make it into the final version. The game
was originally to feature additional levels, culminating with a fight against
the "Grand Dragon". Despite the fact that the Grand Dragon never made
it into the game, it may have influenced a much more popular digging game.

[Andy
Walker]…when we were at the preview show, we all knew it was a work in
progress. We described it as such to some Japanese people who were extremely
interested. I think they were from Namco or Atari. We described how you would
find the Dragon and blow it up. Not ‘you kill it’ but specifically ‘you blow it
up’. The Japanese gave us an old-fashioned look then made expanding gestures,
then “boom”. The point being that when we said “blow it up” they thought
“inflate.”

<”The
Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

The
idea of a dragon that you “blew up” later turned up in Namco/Atari's Dig Dug. Walker claims that when he
mentioned the uncanny similarity to Atari, they informed him that THEY were
suing HIM for stealing their (or rather Namco’s) idea. Luckily, at Joel
Hochberg's suggestion, AW had registered a U.S. copyright on their game in
November of 1982, two months before Atari and Namco copyrighted Dig Dug and nothing came of the threat.
While The Pit wasn’t a major hit for
Centuri, they did sell $2.9 million worth, probably about 1,200-2,000 units[2].

The Pit ended
up being AW Electronics sole arcade video game. They did develop a few games
that never made it to production, including Stamper (a game in which the player tried to deliver items by foot,
plane, or car while avoiding being stomped flat by wandering beasts) and Hunky DoorKey (a maze game in which the
player collected keys to open doors). Meanwhile, with their royalties from The Pit, Andy Walker and Tony Gibson
purchased some Intertec Superbrain computers and began working on another game
called Pipeline. Eventually they
formed a company called Tasket and released Pipelinefor the Commodore 64, along with a
number of other innovative titles such as Super
Pipeline (probably their most popular game), Seaside Special (which involved throwing seaweed at leading U.K.
politicians)and Bozo’s Night Out (in which the player guided a character named Bozo
on a pub crawl, trying to get as drunk as possible before returning home
safely)

[1] While the game’s flyer says it was
licensed from Hiraoka & Co, the attract screen says it was copyrighted by
Centuri and Amenip.

[2] According to Centuri’s annual report,
their biggest production run of the year was 2,000 units. If there was only one
game per run and The Pit only had one
run, that would mean The Pit sold
2,000 units. If there was more than one game per run (the report said that
Centuri never had more than two games in production at one time) then the figure
would be lower.

BONUS PICTUREThis has nothing to do with Centuri but I was recently discussing Taito America's games and thought I'd post the following. It's a marquee for the ultrarare Taito America game Black Widow that was sent to me by the game's designer, Mark Blazczyk. Some report that the game was unreleased, but Mark recalls that a few copies made it out the door.

17 comments:

I definitely would be interested in hearing more about Chris and Tim Stamper's arcade development days. Seems like that's always where they really wanted to be since Rare was called Rare Coin-it for a while.

By the way, I thought The Pit guys also made the game The End? I recall reading that in one of the Retro Gamer articles I thought. Keep up the good work on these articles!

I haven't heard that The Pit guys worked on The End. AFAIK, The End was developed by Konami. AW Electronics did have a relationship with Konami but I don't think they ever developed games for them (I don't know if Konami turned to any outside firms to develop games).

From what Andy Walker told me, AW Electronics got out of coin-op after The Pit. It's possible that The Stampers/Zilec worked on The End, but I've never heard that either (though they did a number of games for Jaleco).

The Stampers are famously tight-lipped, so there isn't a lot of info out there about their coin-op days. I recently ran across a couple of Brit computer magazines from the 1980s that touch on those days (though the articles were about Ultimate Play the Game/Ashby - their computer software company.

There was also a recent post on The Digital Antiquarian blog (which I highly recommend, BTW) about them which had the most info I've seen anywhere.

I've tried contacting various people from Zilec without success (there weren't many of them - it was basically Norman Parker, the Stampers, John Lathbury, and Carole Ward at first).

I don't think so. From what I've read Pipeline was always a computer game and they only did 2 or 3 arcade games to finance the computer game (They did another arcade game called GWNN [Game With No Name] that "became the new Andromeda" according to Andy Walker, but I don't know if it was completed)

The company they created after AW Electronics was Taskset (not Tasket). GB64.com lists their C-64 games, and Commodore Zone has some more info about the company and their games: http://www.the-commodore-zone.com/legends/taskset/taskset.htm

There's 3 different versions of The Pit arcade game - the original (by AW Zilec Electronics), the licensed version by Centuri (which is exactly the same), and a version by Taito (that is slightly different). A Centuri flyer has a screenshot of a 4th version that has "Centuri" on the tank, instead of "Zonker". Not sure if this version was ever archived. There's also a handheld version called Zackman and a home version for the C-64 (by HES) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHZIK-I7H0. Ironic that Taskset didn't do the C-64 version.

The Pit is IMO a good game that with some tweaking would have been a great game, as all the games inspired by it (such as Dig Dug and Boulder Dash) have shown. Both fixed the major flaw with The Pit in how your character moves through the dirt. Shame nobody ever worked on improving it or adding the features Andy had planned for it. Btw, here's a site with an interview with Peter Liepa: http://www.boulder-dash.nl/interview.php?lang=en

Interesting thing about that supposed legal threat by Atari: I cannot find any matching entry for The Pit in the public catalog of the United States Copyright Office, neither by searching for AW Electronics, Andrew Walker, or Zilec (Century is a bit too tough to search on its own, but Century Electronics yields no match, either).

BUT, the oldest copyright claim (PA0000133618) for Dig Dug was registered in April 1982, claiming it was published (presumably in Japan) in February, so something is definitely off about this story.

Are there any sources for the date of that London Previews show? That term is near impossible to Google and this very page was literally the only relevant result I could find.

The copyright record for The Pit (PA0000134700) was registered by Centuri on 3/25/1982 with a date or publication of 12/3/81. Author was Slogan Court Ltd, t.a. A.W. Electronics Computer Graphics Systems.

A supplement to the above copyright (PA0000153279) was registered on 11/12/82.

To find them, search under Centuri (not Century).

The 1981 London Previews was held September 12-15 (as reported in the November 15, 1981 issue of Play Meter).

The copyright date in the post may have been a typo (either mine or that of the Retro Gamer article).

Thanks for the clarifications. September to February was definitely enough time to make an arcade game out of the idea they got at the trade show.

I asked someone to check the Retro Gamer article, and apparently there Walker just said that their copyright was three weeks ahead, which fits with the late March vs mid-April dates. Maybe you accidentally put in the date of the supplement when writing the blog post?